How can they stop the bleeding?  City council has instructed their administration to start an investigation into why commercial tax payers seem to be winning so many assessment appeals.

As part of re-assessment, businesses will often hire lawyers to try and save them from paying at least part of their taxes based on assessment.  For Moose Jaw, it's resulting in losing hundreds of thousands of dollars every year according to Finance Director Brian Acker.

"At this point in time, we don't really know why we seem to suffer some higher loses as compared to other communities and that was part of the conversation with city council, what are the steps that we can take to address that."

Acker said they thought some of the issues were with a change to re-assessment and that it would all just go away, but the hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost taxes continued. So they'll meet with the Saskatchewan Assessment Management Agency to review the process, review the numbers and see if there's a common trend that can be addressed.